If you’re lucky enough to have Fresh Direct deliver to your apartment, consider yourself a fortunate soul. Down here in the bowels of the city (and I say that with the most love possible, as I was born and raised here in Little Italy) Fresh Direct doesn’t feel we deserve their services. After speaking to their corporate office, I learned that they have to compete with too many other delivery trucks and that parking was a “real issue.” Seriously? Like parking anywhere in this city is not an issue? —
With six-year-old twins in the house, you can imagine how much food we go through. Our family drinks enough milk to warrant getting our own cow…but how would he fit in the fridge?
Indeed, grocery shopping for this family has never been easy.
When the twinnies were small, I stayed local. I would visit Met Foods where the isles are no wider then a very narrow doorway. Every shopping experience was like a scene out of a game show (think Supermarket Sweep from the ol’ days). I would leave the house with my twinnies in their Valco Twin Trimode and me armed with laundry bags. Yes, laundry bags!
You have to understand that the stroller I had was not one of the smaller tandem ones. I learned quickly that it was better for the kiddos to have room than for me to fit through the aisles of supermarkets. So…how did I do it? Picture this: I would get to the market with list in hand and push the stroller in front of me and pull a grocery cart behind me. My stroller would only fit through the front, rear and side isles, so I would start with those, grabbing what I needed as I passed. When I’d get to an inside isle–one of the ones that my stroller wouldn’t fit down–I would leave the babies at the end of it and run, yes, literally run, up and down the aisle collecting items off my list. Thinking about it now, I am laughing out loud. Folks must have thought I was crazy, and you know what? They would be right.
I repeated the “sweep” until I finished my shopping and then made my way to the registers. After paying, I would load up all my groceries into the two laundry bags I had brought and hang them off the stroller handle. NOTE: I don’t recommend doing this–it’s not the safest decision and you should never hang bags or any other items off of your stroller (even though I know we all do it).
I shopped like that until they were almost four. Once we got rid of the stroller, we had to change it up. It was around that time that I smartened up and started shopping in Jersey City. Hey, did you know that Jersey City is like the Mecca of supermarkets? Yup, right outside the Holland Tunnel there are two large ones within blocks of each other and one is even right next to a BJ’s! Wait, it gets better: the one that is next to BJ’s lets you take your cart right from BJ’s into their store so there is no need to run back to your car.
So if you want to take a trip to New Jersey, email me and I’ll let you know when the twinnies and I go on our next food shopping adventure to the Garden State.
The moral of the story: When it comes to groceries, where there is a will there is a way!
